I have already left for Plurk. I use Feedtweeter to send all my Plurks to twitter.
- Jon

it isn't going to be a unreliable issue, it'll be a 'reliable other thing' (like friendfeed) issue. when you are certain that enough of 'the conversation' has moved away, and we can get away without twitter, we'll leave. i'm willing to wager it's already happening. the question i ponder is: can twitter regain its footing, or have they permanently lost it? i hope the money/team can make enough impact fast enough...
- Jeremy Toeman

The thing that bugs me is that it took some time to build an audience on Twitter. I don't want to give that up by hopping to another service. Although if everyone I Twittered with came over to FriendFeed, I'd jump. Right now it's about 33%
- Rafe Needleman

I hear you, Rafe. As it is right now, I'm using both FF and Twitter, but if they have another major outage, I think a bunch more people will switch. Still, because FF is promiscuous (it reads my Twitter feed) there's no loss to continue to use Twitter while it remains useful.
- David Sifry
from twhirl

Rafe - same for me. I don't want to move to another app and rebuild my community. So, I guess i'll have to suffer through the Twitter growing pains.
- Jim Turner

FF is a much better place for conversations Rafe. I suspect that someone like you, a prominent tech journalist, would build up an audience here just as large as your audience at Twitter. For what it's worth I haven't been on FF all that long and I've got almost as many people following me here (2,797) as I've got following me at Twitter now (3,177). The audience is growing faster over here than there as well.
- Thomas Hawk

Bwana & Thomas are right, it won't be a problem to get audience here, You might like it even more here
- Dobromir Hadzhiev

Twitter is no where near dead yet. My personal theory is they didn't expect loads of people choosing to massive amounts of others. In the past week, I've had several people with absurd numbers of follows (one with 60k, one with 90k) - that's insane. Twitter has hired some top talent to address these issues and got new rounds of funding to assist. Personally I still love twitter and find it a different and useful complement to Friendfeed.
- Doug Brooks

I'm on it less than before, but use Twitter as a gateway to more reliable socnets like FriendFeed, where we can have longer discussions. The community on Twitter still merits having an account there. Can we be hopeful that now that they got another round of funding, they'll FINALLY find ways to make it more reliable?
- Cathryn Hrudicka

FriendFeed is certainly a very reliable Twitter client, I'm finding. It's nice to get everything that everybody's doing -- not just what they tweet -- inside a feed as well.
- Jared Smith

Twitter peaked during the early primaries, it was an incredible learning and connecting tool. It's not doing anything for me anymore. So have I moved on? Not exactly, because nothing has come along to replace it. FF is very different, and most of the people I connected with on Twitter aren't here. I've always said it's about the people. Nothing else.
- Dave Winer

Compared to mobile carriers and cable companies, Twitter does quite well. It's free and works most of the time. I'm sure things will get better given all the $$$ they've raised recently.
- Mike Reynolds

As long as it takes for FriendFeed to handle SMS posting.
- Rubin Sfadj

As wonky as Twitter is, I'm still preferring it to Plurk. FF is gaining steam with me, but it still seems more static to me somehow. Haven't pulled enough people into my circle here yet, I suppose.
- abacab
from twhirl

unreliable? I would say unpopular ;) I would leave twitter If I could follow ALL my friends and MORE interesting people in other place :)
- Lora Lufark

Excellent, a Twhinge (Twitter + whinge) thread! In all seriousness... I posted about this situation at Broadcasting Brain today. I am feeling fed up and having the Reply function on the Twitter Web app disabled doesn't help at all.
- Mark Dykeman

excalipoor, but he is Rafe Needleman, an influential and popular online tech journalist. People will follow him wherever he goes as well.
- Thomas Hawk

Have you given it up? Me neither. That's 'cause we forget how much it sux when its working right.
- shelisrael1

There have been plenty of opportunities for people to move off Twitter to clones. Since it hasn't happened yet, primarily because it is hard to bring your community with you, I don't expect it to happen ever.
- Bob Ngu

How expensive does gas have to get before people like me give up driving cars totally? :-)
- Bassam Islam
from twhirl

Twitter indeed has its limitations. It is NOT a replacement for the fluidity of IRC, it is not viable as a live conference tool, at so many junctures it introduces latency, this is all before we touch upon its infrastructure, reliability, and ability to scale. Perhaps Bezos' infusion of cash will see to thoee last points
- David Blumenstein
from twhirl

For me the thing the twitter offers is the ability to sms info quickly to a bunch of people. Events like Siggraph twitting about the next events or the results of events as they happen to people at the shows. Imagine if the SF Giants twittered player info at their games or things like that. I do agree that it's horrible for conversation, but one-way info is a perfect use for it.
- Doug Brooks

I like FriendFeed more every day. But I miss Twitter.
- Rafe Needleman

I don't rely on it for communication. To me it's like graffiti on a wall. I'll keep reading it, but if they repaint the wall, c'est la vie.
- Patrick Beard

As long as there is a backup, like FriendFeed, I think Twitter can go out regularly... for me, this works. For all the good Twitter-based projects or business models, Twitter is running out of charm....
- shanebe

New money and new people coming in to Twitter. Users have been through all of this and stayed so far...they will wait it out. Twitter will and must fix the architecture once and for all and conclude on a viable business model and be off to the races. I'm as sick of the flying whale as anyone else but inexplicably I haven't left...and I don't think I will.
- Paul Marshall

We're all getting tired of the hit/miss feature set and repeated, unplanned downtimes. Twitter management of their app is beyond weak, it's moved over to an untenable business and is completely unreliable at this point. I do think they are taking active steps to rectify the instability of their current app / db environments, but it may be too little, too late.
- Susan Beebe

you lot have very short memories - ebay, amazon, google, world of Warcraft all had issues when they hit viral explosive growth - icq,hotmail - I could go on and on. The fact that there is this much heat about it shows that it will get through the hurdles and move on.
- Ed Dale